Success, nounDefinition: The fact that you have achieved something that you want and have been trying to do or get.
Success for Black women has traditionally been shaped by limiting and restraining racial and gender stereotypes born out of larger, intersecting systems of racism and sexism. Psychologist Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden, the co-author of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, shares on Break Concrete: Black Women at Work that in order to respond and cope in the workplace specifically, Black women have had to shift behaviorally, cognitively, emotionally, even fundamentally to “respond to racial and gender bias conscious.”
Done consciously and unconsciously, Black women’s ability to survive myths and stereotypes (ranging from inferiority to superheroism and superhumanism) has required shifts in vernacular and language, body and appearance; even goals, aims, and dreams across our personal, political, and personal lives. However, for Black women born between 1981 and 1996 (the Millennials generation as defined by Pew Research Center), current shifts in understanding and attaining success has meant re-evaluating and revolutionizing our personal, professional, and political realities and goals.
Centering Mental Health Wellness, for Self and Community
Black women in public and private, personal and political space, are reprioritizing mental health wellness as essential to their understandings of success. Therapy for Black Girls, for example, was founded by Dr. Joy Harden Bradford to present Black women across the country with relevant, accessible mental health information and resources. On the website’s weekly podcast, Dr. Bradford recently stressed the need for Black women to shed the status of superwoman and “not measure ourselves against unrealistic standards and to recognize that our worth does not come from how much pain we can withstand.”
Similarly, on a recent blog post on Therapy for Black Girls focused on Black women healing and prioritizing ourselves, licensed mental health and professional counselor Jasmine Belvin, LMHC, LPC shares that the internal and external pressures for Black women to caretake and perform, despite being “overworked, unappreciated, and devalued,” must be met with the reclaiming of time, boundaries, self-compassion and joy.
Black women’s centering mental health wellness has also made way for radically transforming our understandings, commitments to, and boundaries with family and community. From the resurgence of Black birth workers, newly emerging parenting philosophies and perspectives, to hard conversations and lines drawn on toxic parent-children relationships and corporal punishment, Black women are engaging in intergenerational accountability, coping, and growth in the interest of communal healing.
Addressing and Transforming Political Realities
Building on legacies of community-driven activism and advocacy, Black women are at the forefront of holistic research and advocacy aimed at eliminating challenges and barriers to Black folxs’ access to justice, safety, security, and wellbeing.
The 2017 Status of Black Women in the United States report, for example, was produced by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in collaboration with the National Domestic Workers Alliance in order to provide a holistic overview of the social, political, and economic conditions facing Black women in America. The report's findings capture current disparities and inequities facing Black women in political participation, employment and earnings, work and family, poverty and opportunity, health and well-being, and violence and safety. Possibilities for positive, societal transformation, they conclude, rest in the recognition of Black women’s “essential contributions to the productivity, wealth, and success of the nation” and “social and economic change with full and equal access to our social institutions and political power.”
Similar reports have been created by the Congressional Caucus for Black Women and Girls on the state of Black women and girls in 21st century America, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration on gender in Black immigrant communities in the United States, AfroResistance in their Statement for the 27th Session of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, and the African Women's Development's Fund on health equity issues and women’s organising in Africa and the Diaspora—all in the interest of transforming social, political, and economic lives of Black women and communities transnationally.
Creating New Career Opportunities and Pathways
The economic and financial wellbeing and security of Black women, in the United States specifically, is shaped by labor force and employment inequities. Navigating high unemployment rates, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, as well as “unique barriers at the intersection of race and gender in the US labor market” explored by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Black women millennials have found opportunity and community in entrepreneurship and the gig economy.
Aware of earlier stated stereotypes, myths, and expectations of Black women in the workplace, Black women millennials have increased in presence and impact in business ownership and independent/freelance contracting and consultancy work. The 2020 Women of Color in Business: Cross-Generational Survey, authored by Bonita Stewart and Jacqueline Adams, found that Black women millennials navigate the business world with confidence in and commitment to sisterhood, entrepreneurship, and workplace autonomy. Younger generations of Black women at work, they share, asserting “greater control over their destinies.”
Goldman Sachs 2021 Black Womenomics Report also reports that—
"Changing the economic disadvantages that Black women face is a multidimensional commitment across the public and private sectors and efforts to effectively address the issues can only succeed if Black women are actively engaged in formulating the strategies and framing the outcomes."
And the fastest way to do this, they argue, is to simply listen and invest. They propose increased access to capital for Black women entrepreneurs and investments Black communities, including in affordable housing, quality healthcare, and childcare facilities in primarily Black neighborhoods as necessary actions for lowering barriers and risks to Black women’s economic security.
Black women millennials understand “systemic prejudice and the true unevenness of the playing field,” Sophie Williams explains in her book Millennial Black: The Ultimate Guide for Black Women at Work. Understanding this, we continue to explore, experiment, process, transition, and create for the sake of ourselves and the communities we are a part of—affirming our commitments to individual and communal healing and wellbeing as fundamental to individual and collective success.
Tune in to season one of AMAKA's new podcast series Then&Now from May 26th to hear Ghanaian-American writer Zeba Blay discuss redefining success and her nearly decade-long career writing about pop culture at the intersection of race, gender and identity.